Casting Call

So our favorite little white ponytailed warrior posted the other day about who would play Jess in the WOW movie. Then Khol Drake did a response post of sorts, also tagging a couple of other bloggers as well, including yours truly.

Well, here is who would play me in tree form:

Hahahaha. Pretty tree, eh? But who would play me in nightelf form? Well my pick is Michelle Yeoh:

Yes, she may be a little more appropriate for someone who plays a rogue or a warrior. But there is something about her that seems very calm and in tune with nature (my tree bit), however she strikes me as someone who you wouldn't want to mess with (my personality bit).

Now perhaps in choosing Michelle Yeoh, you're thinking hmmm... so is she Asian? Well yes friends, I am. In fact, here is a pic, small but real. (OMG look what you have caused Khol Drake!!!) Anyways, so there is the face behind this blog and K. Hai2u guys.

Specifically I am Korean, like my fellow Korean brother Jong. He did a hilarious post the other day saying one of the reasons he excels at WOW is because he is Korean, due to our +15 Gaming and +15 Calculus racial bonus. LOL. But no, I will still not be doing any sorta math-y add-y calculative stuff on this blog. I can do the maths, but it doesn't mean its something I like to do. :) I'll take the +15 Gaming bonus though.

Now a couple of my guildies have known for a while that I was Asian... I wonder if some of the others are a bit surprised? I wonder if any of my readers are surprised? I don't know... I would imagine you know someone for a while in game or read someone's blog for a while and form some sort of mental image of them.

Anyways, back to the reason I first did this post. So who would play you in the WOW movie?

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K's inbox... boo to you

I recently got two WOW related emails that caused a reaction that can be summed up as "Oh bleh... boo to you"

First, an email from Blizzard "reminding" me that I can signup to watch Blizzcon over the internet. I love the first line of this email, which starts "Blizzcon 2009 sold out in record time". Yeah, I remember well... as evidenced here and here. Thanks for reminding me and rubbing it in even more Blizz.

You know what? I am NOT going to sign up for your internet thing-e-me-bob. It's not the same and I ain't paying for it. So there. :p (I'm sure Blizz is just devastated.)

Secondly, an email from a leveling/gold/account selling service website saying that they'd like to advertise on my blog via text ads or blog posts. I've gotten these type of emails before and I won't mention the site, because then they'd get the advertisement they want. But seriously? Do bloggers really take up such offers? For what... an extra couple of bucks?

I would seriously be disappointed if one of my favorite blogs started taking money to advertise gold/account selling sites, sites that I feel are offering a shady service. I don't know... is it just me?

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Miscellaneous Monday

A number of random miscellaneous stuff to share:

1. Camouflaged tree is... camouflaged

Here I am getting ready to jump an unsuspecting victim. Beware the tree!

2. Mila Kunis, the "kick ass mage"

So I think I had heard elsewhere before that Mila Kunis plays or played WOW. I came across this interview she did last October on Jimmy Kimmel. What amuses me is that it just makes you realize how crazy our little WOW language/world can seem to outsiders. She talks about WOW from about 3:45 - 5:50 from this clip.

3. That's quite a spread!

Have you ever really looked closely at a mage table? Isn't it pretty? Fish and fruit as well... looks mighty tasty!

4. Who names these items?

I'm curious as to how they get the names of certain items in the game. I'm doing stuff in Dalaran when Tears of Bitter Anguish comes across in trade chat. It caught my eye because I think it has such a sad, but beautiful name. Then I see the "They shimmer with sadness and woe" part. Awwww.

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WIM plug

Now in terms of addons, I would probably say that I am a medium user, falling somewhere between Paradise and Veloreynn. I probably have the standard addons that most have including Grid, Atlas Loot, DBM, and Omen. One nice addon that I've had for a while that I really really love is WIM, WOW Instant Messenger.

WIM basically turns your whispers into their own individual chat bubbles. I love it for several reasons. I can step away from the computer and come back and not miss any whispers. I don't have to scroll up to see if anyone whispered me anything. Their last whisper to you is just in that chat bubble.

Secondly, it solves the pesky issue that I'm sure all of us have had where we whisper something to the wrong person. WIM has definitely reduced my need to say "Oops, MT". I think the last time I remember doing this was when I was poking fun at one of Jess' lectures. The whisper was intended for Vel, but I accidently sent it to Jess. It wasn't too bad because Vel and I both openly poke fun at Jess in both raid chat and over vent, but this MT could have been bad!

Finally, you can set WIM to record a history of your whispers. It's kind of a nice feature to have in case you ever have to use whisper history to bribe anyone (which I would of course never ever do).

The only amusing part of using WIM is when you have a ton of whispers going on at the same time. As Jess and Kalthan remember, I logged on one night last week into Ironforge and stood there for nearly an hour with 7 or 8 chat bubbles open and going on at the same time. They took up my entire screen so that I couldn't see anything beyond them!

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Nubcakes

I went through a phase a while ago where my new favorite word was nubcake and I was calling everyone around me a nubcake. In my mind, a nubcake is what you call someone who is clearly acting as a noob, but because they are your friend, you add the cute endearing cake part of it.

Now there are varying levels of nubcakes. Sometimes it can be minor and just a nubcupcake, but on the other end it could be quite substantial and be a big old nub five tier cake with tons of frosting. I've been a nubcupcake, a nubcake, and a nub five tier cake. Let's see some examples.

Last night we decided to finish up a Naxx run that was started to gear up a bunch of alts. We head into the military quarter and start clearing the trash up to Razuvious. We're on the last set of trash before the boss, when we pulled a number of groups so I was having to heal a bit more than normal. So I go to use my trinket, and I see that I can't proc it. Huh? What in the? Oh... I've been healing up to this point in my full pvp gear and my pvp spec. Oops, nubcake.

I shared it with the raid, and they laughed. Now I've also been in an five man or a raid a bit before realizing that I had my fishing hat on. Oops, nubcupcake. A while back we were gearing up alts in a heroic VH run and it wasn't until the third boss that I realized that I was healing the entire time with my fishing pole. Oops, nub five tier cake.

I'm thinking that we may have more of these nubcake moments than others just because you can't see our gear in tree form. I love that when I'm wearing ugly or mismatched gear, but on the other hand if I have pretty gear on, I wish I could see it more. However, nubcakedom is not limited to us trees. Case in point, during the Razuvious fight when Jess was controlling an understudy:

Jess: Heal my guy up! He's almost dead!
K: I am healing him, chill out.
Jess: No, I mean heal my understudy!
K: Um, he's at nearly full health, what are you looking at?
Jess: Oh, I confused his rage bar for his health bar.
Rest of the raid: (much laughter and mockery)

Talk about nub five tier cake!

Finally, a totally un-nubcake related moment. We had our smoothest kill of Thorim this past week. Woot! Now we had been stuck up to Freya in Ulduar but hadn't had the chance to work on her the last two raid weeks. Well this past week we went in and she ended up coming down! The dps worked together so awesomely in coordinating getting down those three adds.

We then took a quick peek and a couple of attempts at Mimiron. The trash and the train ride to Mimiron was fun and different and really cool. I think it'll take us a bit to learn the fight, but its nice to be doing something different. After our two attempts, Suzzy wanted to see what happens when you push the big red button. So she did. And it was scary and firey and dangerous and bad. And we died. But it was funny!

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No time! There's never any time!

There's been a number of changes with work and the project I'm on right now, which will mean I will be super super busy for the next two months. I know I have to feel lucky in this economy that I still have a job (and believe me, I do), but can I just bitch a bit here about how crazy, stressed, and overworked I am/will be?

So WOW-ing has been very minimal this week, and I sort of expect that to continue for a while. I'm just too exhausted when I come home to think about staring at a computer screen for any more time. When my exhaustion affects my snarkiness and desire to make fun of Jess or Chachi or Kalthan, you know its bad. I'll still definitely be playing, raiding, and blogging, but probably a bit less than I have the last couple of months.

Bonus points to anyone who can identify this quote:

"No time! There's never any time! I don't have time to study... I''ll never get into Stanford. I'll let everyone down! I'm so confused. I'm so excited... I'm so excited... I'm so scared... "

Damn, and I really wanted to get into Stanford...

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ABsolutely ABsurd AB

I've recently mentioned how AB is my favorite BG now, especially since on the Emberstorm battlegroup, alliance seem to have learned how to play it. Now someone was reminding me the other night how a long long time ago I was painfully grinding AB marks for some pvp upgrade I needed. The grind was so incredibly torturous, that I forbid anyone to put the letters A and B together in guild chat, because it was that painful for me.

So its really nice to be able to play AB and actually have fun from it now. I think its also a lot better practice ground for arena than AV, which I used to play a lot. A couple of funny stories from my recent AB adventures:

1. Are we all healers here?

In one of my matches, I was going from base to base as needed. Someone called out that they needed help at the blacksmith, so off I went. Now once I got there, there ended up being 5 of us alliance at the blacksmith. So there we are going at it against 5 or 6 hordies. Now a minute or so passes, and I don't see much changing. The 5 of us are still all up, as are the horde. What was going on?

Well what was going on, was that all 5 of us alliance there at the blacksmith were healers. Four druids and a shammy. LAWL. I /s-ed, 'Are we all healers here'? We all laughed, and one person asked in battleground chat 'Um, can we get one dps to the blacksmith please'? A warlock came over soon after and we took them down. It was so funny though, that all 5 of us ended up being healers!

2. I'm just going to follow you around, ok?

I find that its not very common to find healers in BGs that have a lot of resilience. Thus, once folks realize that I can heal them to death while staying alive, they start to enjoy their "pocket healer". I've had multiple melee folks say that they will just start following me around to whatever base I decide we need to attack or defend so that they can get my sweet sweet healz. (Ok, maybe I exaggerated one or two sweet there).

The only drawback to this is when folks start to boast in battleground chat about their high number of honor kills with only zero or one death. When they do this, I do have to set them in their place, reminding them in battleground chat as well that it was only because I was healing their ass.

3. Cyclone: you are evil. But I love you.

There were many times it was just me and one hordie at a base in AB. Well clearly, I'm not going to be able to take them down. But hell if I'm going to let them take the base. So I'd just cyclone them over and over and ask in battleground chat for someone to come help me.

If I was being continuously cycloned, I would be seriously pissed. Its an eeevil eeevil spell. But oh, do I love it so!

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Random raiding thoughts

I have a number of thoughts/comments around raiding I wanted to share, so I shall just smush them all into one post.

1. Is it a full moon or something?

Isn't it odd how sometimes everything just seems to go all so wrong? I mean how on one night a raid seems to just be so off.... dps, healers, and tanks. We had one of these nights this past raid week where it was just such an off night. But nearly the same group came back the next night and kicked ass. I don't get what makes an off night an off night. Was it a full moon or something?

2. 1/10 = 10%

Now continuing from this first point, I won't start the whole debate again around 10 man vs 25 man raids. But Jess and I have talked about how a single raider carries more weight, or responsibility in a 10 man. One person is off, or not carrying their weight, that is 10% of the raid. Compare that to 1/25... I don't know what that is, but I know its less than 10% (complicated maths FTW).

I think its much harder to carry dead weight in a 10 man vs 25 man. Or maybe it is just more noticeable in a 10 man. Am I thus saying 10 mans are in a way harder? Well I don't know, because on a per raider basis I know that 25 man bosses require more dps. But I will say that yes, you do carry more responsibility to a raid in a 10 man.

3. "Feminine healing"?!?!

Larissa at Pink Pigtail Inn did a post bringing back up the old subject of gender stereotypes in WOW and how as much as she hates it, she feels that healing is "girly". The post and some comments talked about healing as standing in the back... being nurturing, passive.

It made me laugh because yes, I am a healer. Yes, I am female. But I bristle at the notion that healing is girly or that females tend to play healers because it is passive and nurturing. Maybe I play a healer not because I am nurturing and passive but because I know how to multi task and can time things well and quickly react to changing situations not only by the bosses but by what your raid members do? How about that huh huh huh? (Sorry maybe a little miffed here).

Now on the "passive" front, maybe its just different for me because as I told Jess, I am probably a healer with a tank attitude. Though Jess did point out that none of our tanks have attitude. Its true, except for when Jess tries to get lippy with me, our tanks don't have attitude. But what I meant with a tank attitude, was perhaps being more aggressive, taking charge, and wanting to run the show.

Trust me, you can take charge even if you aren't a tank. My guild has now taken to calling me the Empress Raid Leader, a nickname oh so lovingly conferred upon yours truly by one of our hunters Kalthan.

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So this is how it feels to be Horde, aye?

Last weekend was Arathi Basin weekend for us. I tend to be more an AV gal, but since it was AB weekend, I decided to check it out a bit. OMFG... I played maybe 6 games in a row and won all 6. Only one was close, the other 5 were pretty much blowouts. I probably ended up playing 10 and lost only 1.

What? Alliance actually communicating and working together in AB? What? Alliance understanding the subtle balance between attacking and defending in AB? Knowing when to attack, when to defend, and how many folks are needed for each?

It actually was a thing of beauty, to see so many Alliance BG teams working so well together and understanding how AB is scored. It did show me that yes, Alliance can win more than just AV. But you know what I thought? This is how it must feel to be Horde.

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Anonymous vs non-anonymous blogging

When I think back to why I first started this blog, it was mainly to capture some of the adventures the Claws were having in game, as well as to share random thoughts and stories of mine. Thus, I shared the name of my toon, my guild, and server from the very beginning. I definitely chuckle when friends and guildies and yes, even complete strangers whisper me in game around something related to the blog. That's probably why I didn't make it an anonymous blog, and I don't regret doing so.

But I also think I started this blog as an avenue to be able to vent about stuff in game as well. For me, writing about things sometimes helps me to get it out and perhaps let it go, or even see it from another perspective. Thus, there are times when I do wish for the complete openness and honesty that can come with total anonymity. If this was an anonymous blog, I would probably share or comment or vent about a lot more stuff. But its not anonymous, and I know the people who are reading it (yay statcounter! hee hee), whether they are friends or other folks.

Anyways, not sure what I'm trying to say here, but my blogger friends can probably relate to some of what I'm saying. Damn, I really do wish I could vent more here. It's my freakin blog... I wish I could say all I wanted to say. Maybe you're asking me, well why don't you then? Well, even I have limits, or a conscience. If I really vented here, the way I do to close friends, I would feel a bit guilty, even if what I was saying was true.

Trust me when I'm venting, its pretty damn funny... being part amusing, part super super feisty, and part downright scary. Hmmm... maybe I need to create a level 1 alt and go troll the server forums or something. :)

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Its just not right

Today I'd like to discuss something that started out for me as minor perturbment (is that a word?), then moved to irritation, and now oscillates (yes, oscillates) between sadness and downright anger.

What has me feeling this way you ask? Two things. First, the fact that I still have yet to get a drake from the Oracles egg and secondly, that I still do not have the turtle mount. Let's investigate these two things a little further.

First, the Oracles egg. I became revered with these folks pretty early on... I can't even remember how long its been. And ever so patiently, faithfully, with a glimmer of hope yet still each week, I go and pick up an egg. And yet, week after week, no drake. Come on, you Oracles folks! I really love how you guys will jump into the lake in Sholazar yelling "Whee"!. I really think you guys are super cute, way cuter than those other guys you keep fighting with (seriously, can't y'all work it all out?). What I do not love is that week after week... no drake. Grrrrr the anger is boiling up again.

Secondly, the turtle mount. I pretty much provide all of the fish feast for our raids. I think we've started a little game where if we're having a tough raid night and have a lot of wipes, I'll ask the raid to guess how many fish feast I've put out. Wut won the other night. I don't know... whoever wins should get some sorta prize. Fish maybes?

Anyways, so this is a lot of fish I'm fishing. And yet, no turtle mount. I'm telling ya, its just not right that me, Salty K, the provider of infinite fish feasts can't get the turtle mount. Sigh... now I'm sad again. :(

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Friday raid funnies

A couple of raid funnies I didn't get to share:

1. I probably said something funny and true but kinda bitchy:

Jess: Hmmm... the bitchiness is strong in this one.
K: And you just realized this now?

2. K gets crap from Kalthan (a hunter giving a healer crap? seriously?!?! what is this world coming to?!?!):

K: Note to self: put post-it note over Kalthan's box in grid

3. While Jess was away I think I was the default raid leader for two raids. Let's look at a couple things I said in raid chat:

K: Successful raid leader-ing is about assignment of blame.
K: I wish Jess would come back to lead the raids. That way I can just be the back seat driver and point out everything that should be changed or could be done better.

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Technical issues

Ok so Jess put up a post yesterday detailing some of the issues I've had on vent recently. Now yes, I freely admit that I am not the most technical person, as exhibited with this little story of when I got my Macbook. Now I've never used push to talk, but prior to this Macbook, I never had this problem. I do think I might have fixed the problem. However, I keep thinking its fixed, and it keeps coming back. Grrrr

But let me just respond to Jess' post a bit. First of all, its Schlitz not PBR! Get it straight! Hahaha... actually it probably was a Diet Coke with Lime (yum... my vice) because I am not a beer drinker. Its also funny whenever Jess hears sirens and says something like "Its like you live in a city or something". Um yeah... I live in Chicago?

Now Jess says that the raid doesn't mind when they can hear everything going on but here's why it drives me crazy. So I'm a pretty fast typer, which several of our raid members have commented on. Atania says that she can guess my mood during a raid by how fast or furiously I'm typing. If I'm typing even faster than normal and pounding away at the keys, whoa watch out. I don't know, I think I type the same all the time, but who knows.

The other issue is that if folks can hear me pounding away and they don't see something come up on raid chat or come across as a personal whisper to them, they know that I am whispering someone something. I don't know... I guess I would just rather keep my typing and the sound of me unwrapping my chocolate poundcake to myself.

But finally, when did tanks think they could make fun of healers? Um hello... the ribbing goes one way here. Just like healz go one way from healer to tank, the ribbing goes one way from healer to tank. kk?

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